Low-Cost, High-Performance Notebooks

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I’m writing this humble screed on a Dell Inspiron 2650. It cost me less than $1,200 three years ago, and it still does everything I need it to do.

It’s not a high-end multimedia notebook with a dozen extra buttons and a 56″ plasma high-def display. It probably wouldn’t be a good choice for watching DVDs or rendering 3-D animation, but it lets me work in office applications, do my e-mail and surf the Web through my home Wi-Fi network.

If that’s the kind of stuff you need to do, you don’t necessarily have to blow $2,500 on an extravagant notebook computer. In fact, it frustrates the heck out of knowledgeable PC geeks who live on a budget to encounter casual users, who have money to burn, doing spreadsheets on $3,000 laptops.

Geek: “So, what else does it do?”

Rich guy: “Oh, I don’t know. I think it has a video editor, HD something-or-other, and a 3-D gee-force gizmo. I just use it for paying bills.”

Geek: “I will hate you forever.”

Jealousy notwithstanding, there’s no good reason to throw away money on features you don’t need. If you leave off the top 50 percent of notebooks by price, you still have a wealth of terrific products to choose from. Just because they don’t cost more than college tuition doesn’t mean they all lack a decent set of features. You don’t even have to settle for that $398 Wal-Mart laptop that people trampled each other to buy on Black Friday.

Check out PCMag.com’s review of low-cost laptops and then take a look at the six featured here to get a notion of just how much computer a little money can buy.

Please note that the prices mentioned herein are based on the prices when and as reviewed by PCMag.com (reviews are linked). Mileage may vary, and prices of electronics tend to go down over time, so you might be able to get these models for less or newer models for the same price. Consult the manufacturers’ Web sites for current pricing.

Notebooks for less than $1,000

You didn’t used to be able to get a heck of a lot of computing power for under $1,000. In fact, a decade ago, you could buy about half a computer with that kind of cash. How things have changed.

It’s unattractive and its battery life isn’t much to laud, but otherwise the V2000Z is a lot of notebook for little money. Available with a midrange AMD Turion processor or a budget-priced Sempron, it packs a surprising amount of RAM, decent hard drive capacity, and plenty of power for most computing tasks that don’t involve gaming, graphic design or defeating high-ranked chess masters.

Weighing in at a relatively light 5.4 pounds, the V2000Z features a 14-inch BrightView display that’s crisp and, well, bright. With its DVD/CD-RW combo drive, it lets you watch movies with decent performance, but don’t expect to do much with 3-D graphics despite its ATI Mobility Radeon GPU. Also, you’ll probably want the enhanced battery, available for around $25, to get almost five hours of battery life; the standard included battery doesn’t quite make it to two and a half hours.

What this notebook has in spades is ports; that is, it sports ports. With three USB ports, a FireWire port, and an S-Video port for piping hot TV display, you’d think it would be happy, but HP also threw in a 6-in-1 card reader that deals with SD, MMC, XD, and other initials.

For its price, this baby packs punch. Its power-hungry, but powerful, CPU is a Celeron D 335, making it an extremely strong product for the price. Considering that it’s a year old, you might find it at an even friendlier price (for a more recent model, check out the 2400 series at Acer.com). At this level, its feature set is especially impressive: 4 USB ports, 802.11g wireless networking and a combo DVD/CD-RW drive are all standard equipment.

Take some time to get used to the banana-shaped keyboard. It’s goofy, but it’s ergonomic, and it’s a heck of a lot better than those stupid split-key keyboards with the big camel hump in the middle. The 15-inch screen is crisp and displays office, Web and e-mail stuff with eye-pleasing intensity.

The downsides of this TravelMate are its weight–it’s a hefty seven and a half pounds–and its battery life, which PCMag.com clocked at an unfortunate 1 hour and 23 minutes. The TravelMate 2203LCi is better suited to be, not a traveling notebook, but one that you carry around the house and bang out research papers, or do your taxes, in any room you please.

Who says you can’t have a multimedia notebook for under $1,000? Dell outdid itself with this amazing combination of power, convenience, features and connectivity by pricing it just under $1,000. It does all that office-y stuff, and a heck of a lot more.

Dell built up its Inspiron 6000 as a general-purpose powerhouse, and topped it off by installing Windows XP MCE (Media Center Edition). With an external TV tuner (not included), you can readily record shows on the relatively spacious hard drive, and still have room for photos and tunes.

The 6000 comes with a Pentium M 725 processor, so you know it’s built for power. At almost 7 pounds, it’s not quite as portable as some notebooks, but that doesn’t mean it’s not perfect as a living room computer, especially in a Wi-Fi-equipped house. It comes ready for DVD playback, complete with a 15.4-inch widescreen display, a DVD/CD-RW combo drive and DVD player controls right on the front panel.

Notebooks for less than $1,500

Add a few hundred bucks and you can score an even sweeter notebook deal. The notebooks here have fast CPUs, large hard drives, big screens and more–and you’re still nowhere near $2,000.

The standout feature of this terrific notebook is its weight: at a mere 3.2 pounds, it won’t cause your computer bag to etch a groove into your shoulder as you walk through the airport. Fitted with a Pentium M processor, it’s powerful enough to handle every office application on the shelf, even if you have a bunch of stuff running in the background.

Even though it’s small and slim–under an inch thick–it won’t cramp your style. The keyboard is full-laptop-sized, and the display is a bright 12.1-inch widescreen. You can turn the Wi-Fi off and on with the press of a key.

It does have its inconveniences. The DVD combo drive is external. What’s more, this TravelMate’s CPU isn’t of the power-saving variety, so battery life with the standard battery pack is disappointing at just over an hour and a half. Acer bundles a bigger battery, but it adds weight to the system.

The as-tested price of under $1,400 is actually midrange for this configurable notebook, which can cost as little as $1,070 in a less power-packed version. A one-time Editor’s Choice winner, it comes to the party at a trim and stylish 5.1 pounds, dressed up in custom covers and a 14.1-inch TruBright widescreen display–sure to turn the heads of the other, less stylish laptops.

With an average battery life of 3 hours, 15 minutes, the M55 is a good traveler, but the alternative, long-life, 12-cell optional super-beefy battery is expensive at $145. A 4-in-1 card reader lets you plug in SD, MS, MS Pro and MMC (sorry, XD dudes!) and the hard drive is a startling 100GB, which offers plenty of room for all those MP3s and photos you absolutely need to take along with you.

While the M55 offers great movie-watching capability and, of course, all the power you need for boring office tasks, its graphics processing isn’t sufficient for gaming. That won’t bother most people, though–with a notebook available for this price, you can start saving for a gaming desktop with your next paycheck.

The entry price for this notebook is $999, but PCMag.com tested a beefed-up version for the price above. It was worth it. For less than $1,500, the DV4000 gives you computing muscle galore, with a Pentium M 770 CPU, a decent amount of memory, a large hard drive (for a notebook, anyway) and more.

One of the coolest features of this laptop is QuickPlay, which lets you play CDs and DVDs without waiting for the system to boot up. If you’re in the mood to screen the newest, latest, most awesomely retooled version of Star Wars or chill out with some Zappa, and don’t feel the need to surf the ‘Net or plug numbers into a spreadsheet, you’ll love QuickPlay.

Other goodies include a LightScribe DVD+/-RW drive, an ATI Mobility Radeon X700 for nice gaming performance, a 15.4-inch widescreen display, 4 USB ports, a FireWire port, a 6-in-1 card reader and premium Altec-Lansing speakers. Its weight and shortish battery life (2.5 hours) are unfortunate, but when you’re talking about what can be called a multimedia notebook for under $1,500, that isn’t much to complain about.

Joel Durham Jr. is a freelance technology writer and author of “PC Modding for Dummies”(Wiley, 2005).

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